How can you demonstrate leadership in a resume? You can’t.

Leadership is a skill that you can only demonstrate in person.

So why do professional and managerial career changers take up valuable resume space trying to convince their reader that they are leaders?

I find that many managerial candidates want to define themselves as leaders, so they use the words leader or leadership over and over on their resumes. This won’t have much of an impact on their audience (the hiring manager), but it helps personally reinforce the candidate’s ego. Since many experienced job changers write egocentric resumes (writing for themselves as the audience, not the hiring manager), this shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Hiring managers don’t search for leadership on resumes, they search for it in person.

They may assume possibility of leadership by candidate’s title, years of experience, and most importantly … accomplishments. Hiring managers don’t believe when a candidate says they are a leader – they’ve heard that many many times.

Hiring managers see leadership when a candidate demonstrates accomplishments.

When writing your resume, consider who your audience is. Are you writing it for yourself? Or for the hiring manager?

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I agree that leadership as an asset doesn’t carry much weight on the resume alone. It must be demonstrated in person with examples and stories that explain how you handle tough situations, how you inspire others etc. But I think most importantly, to demonstrate leadership, one should provide solid references of past colleagues and/or managers who can speak to your talent in leadership specifically.

True enough, although there are a lot of implied resume protocols about not unwittngly confessing to an ABSENCE of leadership. Look at the derisiveness with which terms like “individual contributor” or “just a team member” are used in coaching on how to sift through resumes. It is pretty well accepted that only ‘leading” or “building” a team are worthy of mention on a resume. Anythng less gives license to assuming the worst: that you rode the coattails of others efforts or have no vision or initiative of your own that could guide the way forward.

Good point. The article focuses on the overuse of the words “leader” and “leadership”, based on the false hopes that these may be search criteria. They rarely are, because they are so overused. No decent recruiter, HR rep, or hiring manager would search for these terms. Worse, by inclusion on your resume, you brand yourself as a wanna-be leader. True leaders discuss results and actions to describe leadership.